A delightful sing-along app with some beautiful illustrations that will be
adored by children.

Little Fox Music Box is a collaboration between designer/illustrator Heidi Wittlinger and Shape Minds Berlin, and quite simply, it looks absolutely beautiful. The illustrations here are spot on: detailed, striking, and cute. Whether you view it on an iPhone or iPad, apps in this space don’t get much better looking than this – even the loading screen is lovely. After choosing a song from the intro screen, you’re transported into a one-screen scene, so there’s no panning required. Here, a small child (or someone doing a good job of impersonating a small child) sings along to the song in either English or German. To any sound-minded adults, this may grate after a while, but kids will adore it; this reviewer’s child certainly did.

Within the scene, there are also things to interact with – for instance, in the Old MacDonald song you can touch the dancing chicks (of the fowl variety, of course) to make them do acrobatics; hit the bathing pig (!) to give her a shower, and prod Old McD himself to wake him from his slumber. You can also change the seasons in this farmyard screen by tapping the top-left icon, spawning more interactivity (for example, in winter you can build a snowman). There’s also a karaoke version of each scene, activated by hitting the button on the intro screen. If that wasn’t enough, Fox Studio (a little sub-app accessed by tapping the tree on the main screen) enables you to jam with Fox and his friends, with every object making a different noise. It’s a lot of fun for little ones.

You’d need a heart of stone not to like this app, but if we have one criticism, it’s that there are only three songs – Old MacDonald, London Bridge and Evening Song. We hope there’ll be an update soon with more tunes and screens. It also undoubtedly works better on iPad, due to the detail in the illustrations and the amount of interactive ‘buttons’ to push. Still, it’s a beautifully illustrated, well-designed app that deserves a lot of attention.